However, director Tex Avery and whoever helped write this cartoon keep trying to win me over. The cartoon has the layered backgrounds that give a 3D effect. The radio talks back to Mama Owl (not an original Avery gag but new-ish at the time). And there’s one scene that reminds me of Avery at MGM.
An obese hen at Jack Bunny’s amateur show (“amatuer” in some drawings) gets gonged while singing “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” A trap door opens but she’s too fat to fall through it. Bunny helps with his trusty gong mallet.
Avery doesn’t waste time. Three bars of the song, followed by one of Treg Brown’s crash sounds and a camera shake and it’s done. Compare it to the dolt who gongs himself through the floor. Good gag but it goes on too long. The hen gag is under ten seconds. Perfect pacing.
Berneice Hansell plays the hen. I suspect Warners cartoon fans would want to gong her after hearing her baby-ish voice endlessly.
The cartoon is Avery’s parody of Warners’ The Jazz Singer (originally a stage play), so it has a happy, musical Warners-type ending (which Avery puts his own stamp on with an iris gag). Norman Spencer composed the score.
The song as done by Al Jolson, with Cab Calloway and then with the Yacht Club Boys in "The Singing Kid", is pretty much meant to be a silly, borderline nonsense song, so I kind of let it slide, as the silliness of the song fits a cartoon better than some of the other Warner tunes the Merrie Melodies were required to peddle. Malleting the obese chicken in the head was one of the first gags by Avery at Warners that definitely made the statement this was not a Disney wanna-be cartoon.
ReplyDeleteThis was one cartoon I saw many time in the 1960's. By the 1980's, it pretty much went into the vault. When " Cartoon Network " signed on in the early nineties, they cleaned the print and ran it often along with many other " Merry Melodies " from that era, like " Miss Glory ". With the changing of " Cartoon Network's " format, and " Boomerang " changing, they seemed to have faded away into the vault again. I suppose they may be available on one of Warner's Archive compilation DVDs.
ReplyDeleteI saw it too,in 1960s, thenin the mid 1970s aw it agian.
DeleteBoth "Page Miss Glory" and "I Love to Singa" are on WHV's Golden Collections, looking very nice and with their original titles.
DeleteI have one of those with both of them.SC
DeleteI don't know who actually wrote the lyrics to "I Love to Sing-A", Yowp. I'm pretty sure that Al Jolson did not write it himself, although Ray Heindorf and Heinz Roemheld are credited on IMDB. The added "A"s as suffixes to the words, seem to fit Jolson's phrasing and timing of songs. Sorry you don't like the song.
ReplyDeleteThe cue sheet submitted by the studio claims Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg wrote the song. I've never looked into it.
DeleteThe "ah" suffix works better in dialect than Jackie Morrow's white-bread delivery, which makes it sound like an affectation. It fits Billy Bletcher's German accent. Well, it works for Jolson, who could put life and emotion into just about any song. Too bad he was dead when "The Michigan Rag" came out. I can hear Jolson doing that one.